From the ends of the Earth - English author Nicholas Shakespeare to appear in Cork

English author Nicholas Shakespeare is at Triskel in Cork this week to talk about his book on Tasmania, writes Colette Sheridan.

From the ends of the Earth - English author Nicholas Shakespeare to appear in Cork

English author Nicholas Shakespeare is at Triskel in Cork this week to talk about his book on Tasmania, writes Colette Sheridan.

LORD LUCAN was rumoured to have spent time writing a book in Tasmania, while Marilyn Monroe’s putative daughter was said to have lived there. This idyllic island off Australia at the end of the world, is the same size as Ireland with a population of just under half a million people. It is, says writer, Nicholas Shakespeare, author of In Tasmania, “a place of extremes in which you can find eccentric outposts.”

For Shakespeare, once described by the Wall Street Journal as “one of the best English novelists of our time”, Tasmania seemed like a good place to which to escape. The author, who writes fiction as well as non- fiction, had spent seven years working on a biography of the English travel writer, Bruce Chatwin. When he completed the tome, he wanted to go somewhere that Chatwin had never been.

“The only two places were Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle and Tasmania. I knew nothing about Tasmania other than hearing how beautiful it is.”

And so, Shakespeare went there, never expecting that he would find some of his own family history there, scandalous history as it happens — and a Bruce Chatwin connection.

In 1999, Shakespeare and his girlfriend, children’s author Gillian Johnson, to whom he is now married, went on a trek in the middle of Tasmania.

“It was astonishing. We had never seen such unspoilt landscape. I grew up all over the world as the son of a diplomat. I had never seen anything like this before. It was like an over-exposed film. With the light, you felt you could see forever. We were drunk on the light and there was no pollution.”

The couple travelled to the east coast of the island. “That’s where we saw a small two-bedroom house built of Canadian cedar and glass, facing the south pole, on a nine-mile beach. It was for sale. The Times had just serialised my Chatwin book and the fee was the same amount that the house cost so we decided to buy it. My father came out to Tasmania to try and stop us from buying it. I found him on the beach on the third day of his visit. He turned around and had tears in his eyes. He said he had never seen anywhere so beautiful.”

Shakespeare and his wife lived in Tasmania for half the year for several years. However, when their two children needed to settle in a school for their secondary education, the couple decided to have them educated in England. They now spend about two months every year in Tasmania and Shakespeare’s father, now aged 88, spends time with them there.

When he returned to England after his first visit to Tasmania, Shakepeare’s father contacted his son to say that he had discovered a sack of letters belonging to the author’s grandmother. They dated back to the late 18th century and were written from Sydney and Van Diemen’s land, as Tasmania used to be known.

“When I started to read the letters, they just leapt from the page,” says Shakespeare.

They were from this amazing but really awful character, Anthony Fenn Kemp, known as the so-called ‘Father of Tasmania’.

Kemp is Shakespeare’s great great great great uncle. Born in London in 1773, he was the son of a prominent wine and tobacco merchant.

“He quarrelled with his father and went off to the French Revolution. Then he goes to America where he met George Washington. He ends up going to Sydney as part of the New South Wales corps of soldiers. His job was to look after convicts in Sydney. But it’s quite clear that he’s much more criminal that some of the criminals in his charge. He basically led a corrupt junta, dealing in rum and tobacco, making himself quite wealthy. He was then sent off by a slightly irritated governor to put the flag in the northern part of Van Diemen’s Land to stop the French from colonising it. So he arrived there in 1804 with a few soldiers and some settlers.

“He ran the island for about nine months, driving it into starvation and penury. They didn’t map the island. They couldn’t grow anything there. There were a lot of convicts to look after but many of them escaped. There was a bit of a famine. Kemp was rather hopeless at organising the early settlement.”

(Kemp went on to return to Sydney and led the second mutiny against Governor Bligh. He ended up living in Tasmania where a town, Kempton, is named after him. Kemp fathered sixteen children.)

When Shakespeare first visited the archives in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, he told the archivist that he was a relative of Kemp. The archivist said: “I wouldn’t go around saying that if I were you as Kemp was a man about whom I haven’t heard one word of good.”

This whetted Shakespeare’s literary appetite and he ended up researching and writing In Tasmania which was published in 2005. On his mother’s side, Shakespeare discovered that he had unknown Tasmanian relations; a pair of spinsters who had never left their farm except once, in 1947, to buy shoes. Their journal recounted a saga beginning in northern England in the 1890s, with “a dashing but profligate ancestor who, having played tennis with the Kaiser, ended his life in the Tasmanian bush.”

If Shakespeare’s initial visit to Tasmania was about getting away from the minutiae of Bruce Chatwin’s life, it turned out that he couldn’t do that.

A few miles from the two sisters is a village called Kindred, so called because everybody there is related. I went there and had a look at the graveyard. To my astonishment, the first grave I saw was that of an Elizabeth Chatwin, dated 1862. The next grave was Chatwin and the next. I discovered there were 162 more Chatwins in Tasmania than in England.

While happening upon family — and Chatwin — connections “is pure coincidence, there must be forces we don’t quite understand which arouse our curiosity and lead us to places. I find it ironic that I tried to go as far away from England as I could, only to discover my own story.”

And yes, Nicholas Shakespeare is related to the Bard, albeit about 14 generations back. What a colourful heritage.

As part of the Cork World Book Fest, Nicholas Shakespeare will be in conversation about Tasmania with Denyse Woods, at Triskel, Thursday at 8.30pm.

Cork World Book Fest: Other highlights

- My Life as a Painter, Matthew Sweeney’s latest poetry collection, will be celebrated at the scent library tomorrow at 7pm, where Sweeney will be joined by Jo Shapcott, Maurice Riordan, Gerry Murphy, Mary Noonan, Deane Browne and Patrick Cotter.

- Bodies in the Library: Crime fiction writer, Julie Parsons, in conversation with associate director of UCC’s School of English and author, Mary Morrissey, at the Central Library on April 26 at 7pm. Also, Kevin Doyle’s debut novel, To Keep a Bird Singing will be launched by writer, Danielle McLaughlin at the event.

- Home - From Syria and Slovenia: A specialist on Syria, Diana Darke, author of The Merchant of Syria along with Slovenian writer Dusan Sarotar will be in conversation with writer and critic, Eileen Battersby at Triskel Christchurch on April 27 at 8.30pm.

- A Celebration of New Fiction: William Wall will read from The Islands and Grace’s Day at Triskel Christchurch on April 28 at 8pm. Denyse Woods, author of Of Sea and Sand, will also read at the same event.

- From Facebook to Fiction: Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen started life as a Facebook page and led to a publishing phenomenon. The authors will be in conversation with Deirdre O’Shaughnessy of 96fm at Triskel Christchurch on April 28 at 4pm.

corkworldbookfest.com.

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